Frontline Turkey: The Conflict at the Heart of the Middle East


Book launch

In 2011 Turkey’s President Erdogan promised to make a deal with the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party), but the talks marked a descent into assassinations, suicide bombings and the killing of civilians on both sides. The Kurdish peace process finally collapsed in 2015 with the spillover of the Syrian civil war. With ISIS moving through northern Iraq, Turkey has declared war on Western allies such as the Kurdish YPG (People s Protection Unit) the military who rescued the Yezidis and fought with US backing in Kobane. Frontline Turkey tracks the sequence of events from the emergence of the AKP to that of the Turkish–Kurdish peace process. It also reveals a very little-known aspect of the unrest – the feud in the AKP–Gülen movement – which revolves around the Kurdish issue. It also shows how the Kurds’ relationship with Turkey is at the very heart of the Middle Eastern crisis, and documents, through interviews, how Erdogan’s failure to bring peace is the key to understanding current events in Middle East.